AOL

AOL Inc. (previously known as America Online, written as AOL and styled as Aol.) is an American global mass media corporation based in New Jersey that develops, grows, and invests in brands and web sites such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget. The company's business spans digital distribution of content, products, and services, which it offers to consumers, publishers, and advertisers.

AOL originally provided dial up service to millions of Americans. At the height of its success it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner. As dial up rapidly lost ground to broadband in the early 2000s, AOL's fortunes significantly retracted and it lost the vast majority of its value, laying off thousands of employees. AOL was eventually spun off, and Time Warner is worth fourteen times that of AOL, as of late 2015.

On May 12, 2015, Verizon Communications announced plans to buy AOL for $50 per share in a deal valued at $4.4 billion. The acquisition was completed on June 23, 2015. In the following months, AOL also made deals with Microsoft and acquired several tech properties including Millennial Media and Kanvas to bolster their mobile ad-tech capabilities.

Sessions@AOL

Sessions@AOL is a special avenue of programming conducted by AOL Music. Originally an AOL exclusive, Sessions@AOL can now also be seen as an avenue for non-AOL users as well. Sessions@AOL consists of exclusive and intimate (often acoustic or stripped down) performances of songs by popular musicians, including Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Coldplay, Keane, The Killers, N.E.R.D, Slipknot, Linkin Park, Blink 182, Snow Patrol, Carrie Underwood, Backstreet Boys, My Chemical Romance, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Sean Paul, Thrice, Fort Minor and Evanescence. Many artists also conduct interviews with the band member or performer. Audio performances from Sessions@AOL are often released as live performances on the commercial singles of artists or as exclusive downloads at the iTunes Store.

Releases

Sessions @ AOL

A live album featuring performances from artists such as Coldplay, Alicia Keys, Missy Elliott, Avril Lavigne, Jewel and the Roots was released by Atlantic Records in mid October 2003.

See also

Dial-up Internet access

Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line. The user's computer or router uses an attached modem to encode and decode information into and from audio frequency signals, respectively. Despite the proliferation of high-speed Internet access (broadband), dial-up Internet access may be used where other forms are not available or the cost is too high, such as in some rural or remote areas.

Dial-up Internet has been around since the 1980s via public providers such as NSFNET-linked universities and was first offered commercially in July 1992 by Sprint.

Availability

Dial-up connections to the Internet require no infrastructure other than the telephone network and the modems and servers needed to make and answer the calls. Where telephone access is widely available, dial-up remains useful and it is often the only choice available for rural or remote areas, where broadband installations are not prevalent due to low population density and high infrastructure cost. Dial-up access may also be an alternative for users on limited budgets, as it is offered free by some ISPs, though broadband is increasingly available at lower prices in many countries due to market competition.

Sessions

Sessions may refer to:

In music:

Other uses:

See also